President Trump sent Congress the largest-ever publicly disclosed request for spy agency funding, the administration revealed Tuesday.
Details about the so-called “black budget” are slim, but Trump is requesting $59.9 billion for non-military intelligence agencies and $21.2 billion for military intelligence in fiscal 2019.
The civilian spy request is 3.8 percent higher than what Trump requested last year, and the military figure is 2.4 percent higher than last year’s request.
The non-military request covers the 16-member U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA and the National Security Agency, and is collectively known as the National Intelligence Program.
Disclosure of the aggregate NIP request is mandated by the fiscal 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, but the Obama administration and now the Trump administration have resisted calls to release individual agency requests, and say that would potentially harm national security.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement Tuesday that “[b]eyond the disclosure of the NIP top-line figure, there will be no other disclosures of currently classified NIP budget information because such disclosures could harm national security.”
The top-line military budget request was shared with the Washington Examiner by a Pentagon spokeswoman.
Congress typically appropriates less than what is requested, but current funding for fiscal 2018 won’t be revealed until after the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, making it difficult to say precisely how much of an increase Trump is requesting. Prior funding levels must be released under legislation passed in 2007.
Intelligence budget requests are debated behind closed doors by a select group of lawmakers on relevant Senate and House committees and will pass as a classified annex not broadcast to the public or lawmakers who don’t put in the effort to learn the amounts.
Trump’s request for increased funding comes after a year of pushing back on the intelligence community’s finding that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help him win. And it comes as an Obama-era push for greater budgeting transparency recedes.
The most recent individual spy-agency figures were revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who provided the Washington Post with records on the fiscal 2013 budget, showing $14.7 billion in CIA funding and $10.8 billion for the NSA that year.
A reform push led by Peter Welch, D-Vt., and then-Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., featured a plea from 62 lawmakers to former President Barack Obama in 2014 to voluntarily disclose individual agency requests. Their push was backed by unsuccessful legislation.
Stephen Aftergood, director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists, scoffed at the notion that further transparency would harm national security.
“It’s hard to see how disclosure of an agency budget total would cause damage to national security. It boils down to a claim that such disclosure would lead to a ‘slippery slope’ of uncontrolled further disclosures,” said Aftergood, who sued under the Freedom of Information Act to win the then-unprecedented disclosure of the 1997 NIP appropriation figure.
“That argument used to be made in the past to justify the secrecy of the aggregate total as well,” he said. “And now, we know it’s not true. Disclosure of the budget total does not lead inexorably to further disclosures. Likewise, I don’t believe that revealing agency totals would cause damage either.”
